The Book of Lost Books (36 page)

Algernon Charles Swinburne

{1837–1909}

“I AM TOLD that Mr. Swinburne is the best poet in my dominions,” said Queen Victoria. Such high estimation of his voluminous work did not even last as long as her reign.

The unfortunate poet, with his preternaturally large head and shock of red hair, became a byword for the aesthetic excesses and sexual peccadilloes of the so-called Decadent period. His enthusiastic interest in spanking and his ostentatious display of classical mythology seemed dated and, frankly, immature, even before the Great War. He yearned to be
un poète maudit,
an iconoclastic libertine in the manner of Baudelaire or Villon, and yet the closest he came to being tortured was convoluted grammar and the occasional birching.

It is, indeed, difficult to take lines like these, from “Dolores,” seriously:

O lips full of lust and of laughter,
Curled snakes that are fed from my breast,
Bite hard, lest remembrance come after
And press with new lips where you pressed.
For my heart too springs up at the pressure,
Mine eyelids too moisten and burn;
Ah, feed me and fill me with pleasure,
Ere pain come in turn.

Swinburne himself admitted being wary of his “tendency to the dulcet and luscious form of verbosity,” and could even compose passable self-parodies of his alliterative and meandering verse, such as:

Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day, when we die.

It is regrettable that his wit was rarely in evidence in his poetry. As an undergraduate, he regaled his acolytes with satirical squibs, where contemporary events were retold as if they were historical dramas in the style of Victor Hugo. A friend, W. H. Mallock, recollected one in which Queen Victoria was embroiled in a love-tryst between the politicians Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel. Perhaps it was during this comedy that Swinburne also composed Victoria's anguished confession that she had been seduced by an elderly William Wordsworth.

Later, in this vaudeville of Victorian high politics, the focus moves to the illegitimate daughter of the monarch and Lord Russell, who becomes a courtesan under the pseudonym “Miss Kitty” and enthralls various princes and statesmen. “She may have done everything which might have made a Messalina blush, but whenever she looked at the sky, she murmured ‘God,' and whenever she looked at a flower she murmured ‘mother,'” lauds one of her suitors.

After which, Mallock remarks, Swinburne tossed off another glass of port and collapsed into an inebriated slumber.

Puerile, yes, and to an extent just silliness. But if Swinburne had forgone the all-too-frequent jiggers and snifters, and dashed down these skits in manuscripts for his friends, we might now remember him as a precursor to alternative comedy and the satirical irreverence of the 1960s, rather than as a fey and eminently forgettable minor poet of the 1860s.

Émile Zola

{1840–1902}

ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1893, Émile Zola, the most controversial French novelist of his day, addressed the English Institute of Journalists at Lincoln's Inn Hall in London. It was an influential gathering, and a rare accolade for the author, fresh from the completion of his monumental twenty-volume cycle of novels,
L'Histoire naturelle et sociale
d'une famille sous le Second Empire,
better known as
Les Rougon-Macquart.

The subject on which he was asked to speak was curiously apposite: anonymity. Although Zola was indisputably infamous (reviewers had called him everything from a “hysterical pornographer” to a “literary sewer-man”) he was also uncompromisingly private, even unknowable. From this self-imposed distance, Zola seemed more—or less—than a man. He was a factory through which the raw materials of the world were transformed into novels.

Unrelentingly prodigious, Zola catalogued the upper echelons and abysmal depths of French society, rigorously abiding by his motto
Nulla dies sine linea:
no day without a line. George Moore, the philosopher whose professorial writings would have such an impact on the Bloomsbury group, described the Institute of Journalists congress in the
Illustrated Magazine
and captured something of this overwhelming productivity when he lamented that, although the
Rougon-Macquart
sequence was concluded, readers were “now threatened with a novel on Lourdes, which is to be written in seven months; by a novel on Rome, and by another on the Russian Alliance.” The first two titles duly appeared, followed by
Paris
(1897) to complete the
Trois Villes
trilogy. In a rare deviation from his intentions, the Russian Alliance fiction evaporated.

Zola had not always been so unswervingly modern. As an earnest young Romantic, he considered himself a poet. “In this materialist age,” he hymned, “when commerce absorbs everyone, when the sciences, which have grown so big and robust, render man vainglorious and make him forget the supreme intelligence, a holy mission awaits the poet: at every moment and everywhere to show the soul to those who think only about the body, and God to those in whom science has killed faith.”

God, however, proved no match for the literary critic Hippolyte Taine and the scientist Prosper Lucas. By reading Taine's
Histoire de la littératureanglaise,
with its creed of “race, milieu and moment,” and discovering genetic determinism in Lucas's
Traité de l'hérédité naturelle,
Zola threw off his dreamy chasuble and reinvented himself as the scientist of literature. Studied through the lens of inherited characteristics and environmental adaptations, the seeming flurry of humanity crystallized into perfect regularity. The unpredictable was factored out. Tragedies were inevitable but their causes comprehensible. Mankind, thought Zola, would slowly learn to adjust its negative propensities: he did not envisage that later generations would derive, from the same half-understood science, eugenics.

Thérèse Raquin
(1867) explored how this mechanized aesthetic might be programmed into a novel. The critics loathed it, and against their aghast denunciations, Zola depicted himself as an impersonal clinician who had “simply applied to . . . living bodies the analytical method that surgeons apply to corpses.” A one-off
succès d'horreur
was, however, hardly sufficient for his ambitions. From the outset, he was drawn to grandiose schemes. A trilogy on heroism had already been abandoned, as it was considered too light a theme. Looking at a blank wall, a few years earlier, he had come up with
La Chaîne des êtres,
a poem in three cantos, entitled “Past,” “Present,” and “Future,” that would trace humanity from the Stone Age to its “magnificent
divagation,
” while providing a comprehensive survey of “what physiology tells us about the physical man and philosophy about the moral man.” He only had time to jot down eight lines.

The obsession with multivolume structures may be linked with a certain eccentricity of Zola's: a psychological condition called arithmomania. He had to count continually. Daundering down the boulevard, he checked off lampposts, trees, doorways. Taxi registration numbers had to be subjected to some abstruse personal calculus, to divulge if they were lucky or unlucky. When it became transparent that the
Histoire d'une
famille
would overrun the ten novels he had allotted, it was revised, not to eleven or twelve, but twenty. The family tree developed a few quirks and offshoots along the way—a brother materialized out of thin air in
La
Bête humaine,
his brothers blissfully unaware of their sibling during
L'Assommoir, Germinal,
and
L'Oeuvre,
and the childless pander Sidonie Rougon, from
La Curée,
nonetheless transpired to have a mystery child, Angélique, the heroine of
Le Rêve
(though even reading the whole of the
Rougon-Macquart
would not enlighten the poor girl about her parentage). Nonetheless, a quarter-century before its completion, Zola already had the architecture of the series fixed.

From
La Fortune des Rougon
(1871) to
Le Docteur Pascal
(1893), Zola created “a simple exposé of the facts of a family, showing the inner mechanism that makes it run”; a panoramic vision of department stores and gin-traps, railway engines and secret gardens, peasants and politicians, tortured artists and high-class doxies; in short, “the tableau of a dead reign, a strange era fraught with madness and shame.” It brought him vilification and celebration. It had turned him into a perpetual prosification device, an inexhaustible ream-machine. And although tidbits and titles of his future projects were leaked in London, no one could have predicted the drama that would occupy his final decade: the Dreyfus affair.

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery captain, was arrested and found guilty at a court-martial of treason. According to the prosecutor, he had sold secrets about military placements and the specifics of weaponry to the Germans. He was transported the following year to Devil's Island. He was later discovered to be innocent. Dreyfus was Jewish—a fact almost incidental to himself but of material significance to his accusers. In 1896, the intelligence chief, Colonel Picquart, suspected that the evidence for the conviction was unsound and on investigation discovered that one Major Esterhazy was actually the spy. He made his concerns known to his superiors and was swiftly reassigned to North Africa.

In the ensuing struggle for justice, a seam of anti-Semitism opened that convulsed the press and the nation with poisonous intensity. The Jews, it was whispered in print, had a syndicate to fund Dreyfus's appeal. They were profiting from both sides of the conflict. Most of Zola's friends were unabashed about their distrust of “the parasite among nations . . . the cursed race which no longer has a country of its own” (those words, incidentally, are Zola's: Saccard in
L'Argent
reflects his era). Dreyfus's brother and the vice president of the Senate sought Zola's support, and expertise with the papers, a support which he readily gave. When his third article on the affair was published in
Le Figaro,
he was promptly sacked. Cartoons depicting an obese Zola, tattooed with pigs and Stars of David, began to appear in the so-called loyalist papers.

It is difficult, accustomed as we are to monotonous shock-horror revelations, to recapture the sheer power of the front page of
L'Aurore
of January 13, 1898. Under the stark title J'ACCUSE . . . !, Zola named the conspirators who, in his opinion, had framed Dreyfus, and those whose incompetence, apathy, or stupidity had consolidated the plot. He ended this blistering denunciation with a challenge: “Let those who dare do so try me at assize court and let the inquest take place openly, in broad daylight. I shall wait.” They did, and found him guilty. Six months later, when his appeal against conviction failed, Zola assessed the situation, weighed his options, and fled to London, as Paris echoed to the sound of lynch mobs baying for their own particular brand of justice. He had already written, “So there exists such a thing as anti-Semitic youth . . . fresh young brains and souls that this idiotic poison has already deranged? How very sad, and how ominous for the coming twentieth century!”

Under the pseudonym “M. Jacques Beauchamp,” he settled into a fugitive's exile in Sussex. He tried to read the
Daily Telegraph
with the help of an English dictionary, watched a bit of cricket, and worked as furiously as ever. Ernest Vizetelly, a long-term supporter, nearly blew his cover by describing Zola's English sojourn in
The Athenaeum.

He certainly intends a book on it [the Dreyfus affair] in due season and has made many notes with that object—meantimes, between chapters of
Fécondité—
his new novel, and the start of a new quartet,
The Four Evangelists—
M. Zola has been preparing an account of his adventures, experiences and observations in exile. This will be completely illustrated from photographs and sketches.

With the exception of a rather dull ghost story, based on a haunted house at Penn, but relocated to the Médan in
Contes et nouvelles,
the album of English anecdotes failed to materialize (a shame, since Zola was an accomplished photographer).

Zola's first inclination on learning the full details of the Dreyfus miscarriage of justice was that it was prime prospective material. He considered it as a subplot in a novel, and indeed elements of the case were used in
Vérité,
the third of
The Four Evangelists,
alongside the tedious Grand Guignol of a murderous, sexually deviant Catholic priest. He made a “mental reservation” that the affair might do as a drama. But no work truly captures the intensity, the power, and the significance of the episode, except its own history. Henry James claimed—not without a note of rancor—that Zola's zeal stemmed from being a man “with arrears of personal history to make up.” After a life devoted to the aloof vivisection of the world, he had become embroiled in a situation that required action, not redaction. To James, Zola was “treating himself at last to a luxury of experience.”

In 1899, Dreyfus was cleared, and Zola was free to return to France—albeit a France where the unleashed anti-Semitic antipathies still seethed, barely in secret. He worked on: he could do little else. With three of
The Four Evangelists
completed, he toyed with a set of dramas that would “do for the Third Republic what I did for the Second Empire.” But the prose robot was succumbing to its inevitable entropy. The critics were bored rather than scandalized. Zola spoke wistfully of retiring to the Balearics.

Justice—
the final part of the final quartet—remained to be written. In
The Four Evangelists,
Zola had written about the lives of the children of Pierre Froment from the previous
Trois Villes
trilogy. The auspiciously named Mathieu, Marc, Luc, and Jean represented the new virtues: wholesome families, honest and well-rewarded labor, adherence to the truth, and determination for justice. One reviewer archly noted that the new Septuagint of novels showed the Froments as the Rougons who conquered the world. Zola described the final volumes as “a great prose poem, full of life and sweetness,” ruefully adding, “and then perhaps they won't accuse me of insulting mankind.” Did he recall his unwritten poem “Future” as he laboriously attempted to manufacture his own vision of an earthly paradise? “I have been dissecting for forty years . . . You really must let me dream a little in my old age.” The book would envisage a United States of Europe, an alliance of all the nations, the “kiss of Peace” in a New Jerusalem.

More controversially, Zola's friend Maurice le Blond claimed that
Justice
“was to have as its theme Zionism.” How many others knew this? How many others suspected that the Dreyfus material, the taxonomy of anti-Semitism, might well work its way into a novel? Given that his talents were fraying, his phenomenal voltage faltering, perhaps it is better that the triumphal unveiling remains forever hypothetical, rather than half-glimpsed underneath a prolix and turgid last gasp. And yet the reason it must remain so reveals the extent to which the world was not ready for his vision of tolerance.

Zola died before he could finish
Justice,
and
Vérité
appeared with a black border on the cover. The coroner recorded that Zola died from carbon monoxide poisoning. At three in the morning on September 29, 1902, he had complained of nausea, headaches, and dizziness. He opened a window, collapsed, and choked to death. Reconstructions of the state of the fireplace in his bedroom and demolition of the flue failed to explain the lethal buildup of gas; indeed, several guinea pigs later spent an untroubled night in the same room under similar conditions. Worried by how news of any suspicion surrounding Zola's death might be taken by the volatile public, the coroner recorded accidental death.